Thursday, November 03, 2011

This is another Pentax 6x7 shot (Portra 160NC) -- it did a pretty good job of picking up the texture of this agricultural storage tank (which was storing fertilizier, I believe). The color has more to do with the reflection of the blue sky.

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Still playing with my new (to me) Pentax 6x7 -- this is a shot of a local water tower using the 55mm lens and Provia 100F. There is something cool about water towers in this part of the country -- sometimes they're almost like a pin in a map to remind you where small towns are.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

This was shot over the course of two days at the 2011 Nebraska State Fair. There is something uniquely bizarre and exciting about the atmosphere at a fair midway, especially after dark. This is my first real attempt at shooting time lapse.

Technical details: This was shot with a Canon 20D capturing stills with an intervalometer; nearly 5000 photographs were required to make this video. It was primarily shot with a Tokina 11-16, but one of the shots was shot with a Canon nifty 50 1.8. The time compression is one second of video time = one minute real time. The fun thing about shooting this as stills is that the available resolution is technically near 4K, meaning it'd look as good on the silver screen as it does on Youtube. :)

"I dunno" by grapes
ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626
is licensed under a Creative Commons license:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Friday, June 24, 2011

I've been farting around with Oloneo HDR software (full disclosure -- they sent me a complimentary copy; hard to say no to free!) to see how it compares to the other software I use and have used, including Photoshop CS2, CS5, and Photmatix 4. So far, the strengths of Oloneo seem to be in ghost removal (it's been almost perfect at this in most test images I've tried) and in doing a good job of rendering more "photoreaslistic" HDR shots -- i.e., not overcooked. If you've followed me in the past, you know that one of my pet peeves is overdone HDR images that look like something out of a chemically induced Hunter Thompson story. It also has some rather powerful tools (seperate curves for saturation and luminence, for example, with an instantly updating histogram) that make fine tuning an image possible, if you know what you're doing.

Oloneo's weakness currently seems to be that it has no chromatic abberation correction, which is a problem as ultrawide lenses like the ones I use often have a bit of this -- and it gets magnified by HDR photomerges. I tried to get around this by doing the CA removal in Adobe Bridge, saving as TIFF files, and merging the TIFFs, but this resulted in even more (and even weirder) artifacts showing up in the final image. It would seem Oloneo really prefers to ingest RAW files.

Here's a quick comparison I did of an old image that I revisit from time to time whenever I have a new HDR program to play with:

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Like I said, really digging this hipstamatic app. Cats are pretty much my kryptonite -- so even if they're cliche, I usually find myself wanting to take pics of them. Found this little guy hiding today.

Friday, March 04, 2011

I've been playing around with the iPhone app "Hipstamatic". For a $2 program ($7 if you purchase all the available add-ons), this is a heck of a fun way to mess around with what is essentially a cell phone camera.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

We recently visited a friend who runs a barbershop (The Beard and Mane) in Omaha; his shop is like stepping back in time. Included with a shave and a haircut is a good old fashioned vibrating scalp massage, using a vintage scalp vibrator. Now that's service!